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Chocolate-Covered Vegan Strawberry Mousse Cups

There’s something about eating stuff out of a little jar that adds a sense of novelty to the whole experience…

Especially if the stuff you’re eating is airy, creamy, slightly sweet and covered in chocolate.

The original recipe for this appeared on Vegans On Top, an amazing Hebrew blog with all kinds of vegan goodies by a serious omnivore turned vegan. If you are lucky enough to be reading Hebrew, I highly recommend you check out her website!

I made some lazy-girl tweaks and it was quite a success. The sweet-tartness of the fruit meshes well with the coconut cream and diffuses its coconutty flavor.

These cups retain their mousse-y texture best after 1-2 hours of freezing. After that they become too frozen to properly thaw fast enough back into mousse, and it gets difficult to pinpoint when they are ready. However, this way they can be enjoyed as frozen treats.

I find them perfect for making ahead and keeping in the freezer for a hot day when I want something sweet or for times when I want to impress my guests. Using jars helps both with “long-term storage,” presentation, and grabbing one on-the-go.

Ingredients:

Method:

Refrigerate the coconut cream in the coldest part of your fridge overnight. This is the most important part of the recipe and the deciding factor between fluffy, airy mousse and a liquid, runny mess. What we’re trying to achieve here is complete separation of the fats from the liquids. The longer the cans are place undisturbed in the fridge, the more the fatty part will float to the top. So make sure no one moves your cans around.

Now that your cans have chilled overnight, melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in pulses in the microwave and then set aside to cool while you prepare the rest.

Using an immersion blender, puree the 2 cups of strawberries. If you are using frozen strawberries, let them thaw first.

Carefully open and scoop out the coconut cream into a metal mixing bowl. The fatty cream should be almost solid, and not at all runny. Make sure you scoop only the white, creamy stuff at the top of the can, and not the clear liquid on the bottom.

Whisk in the powdered sugar until you reach a relatively stiff, whipped cream consistency. This should happen considerably faster than with regular whipped cream but if you want to speed things up even more, stick the bowl and whisk in the freezer beforehand for a few minutes (I like to put it there before I even start melting the chocolate). By the way, this trick will also make non-vegan whipped cream come together faster!

Pour the strawberry puree into the bowl of coconut whipped cream and gently fold to incorporate. Use rounded motions and scrape the bottom of the bowl each time you go, trying to match the angle of the bowl with your spatula as much as possible so as to avoid breaking the airy texture (just as you would with regular mousse).

Divide the mixture among 10 small jars or cups.

Drizzle the melted chocolate over each serving.

Freeze for one hour (or more if making frozen treats — see my note above).

Before serving, let thaw and top the mousses with chopped, fresh strawberries.